Big fun and fast-paced. For all nerds.
Computer thriller by a master programmer who has given us Breakthrough (1997), about a revolutionary new chip that uses bacterial proteins to fabricate a reproducible molecular memory.
Firewall has world catastrophe in mind. Bruce Tucker, top CIA agent and later a Secret Service agent as well, lost his wife and son through a CIA foul-up and—although he thinks he's killed their assassin, Siv Jarrko—quits the intelligence services to set up his own executive protection service (which keeps billionaires from being kidnapped, assassinated, and so on). Bruce is hired to protect Mortimer Fox, who headed the building of Firewall, a huge, supersecret Manhattan Project–like endeavor for the government. Even more secretly, Fox has built Creator, an artificial intelligence that duplicates Fox's own knowledge, personality, emotions and background, and personally can control Firewall through a back entrance to its program. Fox alone knows about Creator, although he has made his estranged daughter Monica memorize half of the code that will open it. Then he’s assassinated, seemingly by Siv Jarrko (but really by Siv’s vengeful brother Vlad, who loves to disembowel living victims, gouge out their eyes, and salt hundreds of tiny razor cuts—when in a good mood). What is Firewall? A satellite orbiting 230 miles way out that houses an unbreakable communications system that holds all our nuclear launch codes, encryption codes, military GPS navigation (controls every bomber, ship, etc.), identifies all the covert officers and agents in the CIA, contains all classified government records and has all the secrets, dirty and otherwise, of every US intelligence agency (the FBI, NSA, etc.). When Vlad murders four CIA agents interviewing Tucker in a park, Tucker gets blamed and goes on the run, bearing the other half of the code, teams up with Monica in Italy and fights the baddies (North Korea) via Creator, whose AI overheats through excess emotion about the world's suffering.
Big fun and fast-paced. For all nerds.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30060-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.
In Crouch’s sci-fi–driven thriller, a machine designed to help people relive their memories creates apocalyptic consequences.
In 2018, NYPD Detective Barry Sutton unsuccessfully tries to talk Ann Voss Peters off the edge of the Poe Building. She claims to have False Memory Syndrome, a bewildering condition that seems to be spreading. People like Ann have detailed false memories of other lives lived, including marriages and children, but in “shades of gray, like film noir stills.” For some, like Ann, an overwhelming sense of loss leads to suicide. Barry knows loss: Eleven years ago, his 15-year-old daughter, Meghan, was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Details from Ann’s story lead him to dig deeper, and his investigation leads him to a mysterious place called Hotel Memory, where he makes a life-altering discovery. In 2007, a ridiculously wealthy philanthropist and inventor named Marcus Slade offers neuroscientist Helena Smith the chance of a lifetime and an unlimited budget to build a machine that allows people to relive their memories. He says he wants to “change the world.” Helena hopes that her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, will benefit from her passion project. The opportunity for unfettered research is too tempting to turn down. However, when Slade takes the research in a controversial direction, Helena may have to destroy her dream to save the world. Returning to a few of the themes he explored in Dark Matter (2016), Crouch delivers a bullet-fast narrative and raises the stakes to a fever pitch. A poignant love story is woven in with much food for thought on grief and the nature of memories and how they shape us, rounding out this twisty and terrifying thrill ride.
An exciting, thought-provoking mind-bender.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-5978-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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